Perhaps Mark has found and fixed the bug, but for a couple months reloading the front Scientopia page would frequently (but not always) crash Firefox on my iMac. I did a workaround by looking for new posts via the Scienceblogging Aggregated page.

I simply don’t read scientopia as a community. I follow a lot of scientopia blogs (mostly through RSS) and, sometimes add new ones when they’re announced, but I almost never go to the frontpage and rarely read posts from blogs I don’t regularly follow. There seems to be very little positive or negative conversations across blogs except link dumps or conversations within interest areas. To ask a provocative question, does it matter if the geoscientists made their own network and scientopia is diverse if the diversity doesn’t enhance interblog communication?

I just looked at the front page and it doesn’t seem useful. I think the simplicity everywhere on the site is appealing, but particularly on the front page, there is nothing to grab my attention. Having post titles in bold is useless if almost the entire page is titles. A bold title and a few sentence lead for post seems to work a bit better at parsing topics (a modest use of different colored fonts could also help). I was also surprised that I couldn’t see more posts within each topic and couldn’t make a cross-blog page of posts based on a tag or even a formal sub-topic. It looks like each blog has an internal tagging system so one can’t use tags to search across blogs?

The frontpage also amplified a format weakness on the blogs. While I love the minimalism, there is a huge amount of dead space. At least in Chrome, the text and sidebars have a hard coded size which doesn’t scale when I change my window size. This means I have to do horizontal scrolling in a narrow window and have wasted space in a wider window. Particularly on the front page where the right link bar ends well below the bottom of the page, 1/3 of the horizontal text space is completely unused.

As a general issue, the site can be very slow. For example, I just clicked on the “older posts” link on the front page and it repeatedly took 20 seconds to load the next page of text. This is definitely not due to my internet connection. I also had regular Mac Firefox crashes on the site, but I’m now using Chrome.

I’m being surprisingly negative. I really do like a lot of the content and writers here! There’s more that needs to be done to make it a community. Perhaps if the front page is too complex to fix in the short term, links to other bloggers’ posts on the side bar or at the bottom of a post might get more of my attention. A modest use of community building gimmicks might also help (common questions, cooking contests, an Ask Scientopia aggregator…).

The community is built by common content, which is great! I don’t think “bloggy” community things are necessary. I read the combined feed and I hardly ever look at the frontpage. The search on the frontpage does not work.

I like the minimalistic layout of the site, but the design could be improved.

For me personally, Scientopia beats all other scienceblog-networks out there because the content of most blogs here is enjoyable to read and relevant for me. I am a postdoc.

Actually, I prefer the muted tones. I would perhaps darken the grey boxes surrounding every other reply, but otherwise it looks good to me. In regards to the front page, it’s too damn long. Who is going to scroll down through all those categories?

Additionally, in regards to this specific blog, you might want to get a banner that doesn’t look like it was made with MS Paint. Your blog deserves better.

I like the layout and colours of individual blogs – nice and easy to read. I’m another reader who rarely visits the front page – I follow the blogs I’m interested in via RSS – so I have no comments on that.

One thing I’d like is a way to subscribe to comments, or at least see new comments since my last one. LabSpaces, NatNet and Occam’s Typewriter have this, as well as most indie Blogger and WordPress blogs, and I use it a lot to follow conversations I’ve taken part in. It’s definitely something I notice as missing on Scientopia and ScienceBlogs posts.

I second chezjake’s comment on crashing in firefox – I noted that as a regular bug for a while, though I don’t think I’ve noticed it lately. However, I still find the scientopia pages, especially the front page, take a very long time to load. I don’t think it’s purely a number of links issue, as pages like the NYT or ScienceBlogs 24 hour page are much faster. Finally, yes, a little more color and selectivity on the front page would be helpful.

I’m going to bitch here too. The front page takes a long time to load, too long. I usually just go to a specific blog and hit the other blogs through the drop down box to see if anything new is out because it takes so long for the front page to load. Don’t know if anyone else has this problem?

Had the same firefox/mac issue; cleared the cookies for firefox and it stopped. But it was a few weeks of irritation before I came to that conclusion.

I know people complain about the front page, but I *do* like the latest posts section – I check in every couple days, and it’s a quick way for me to see who’s written what without going to every. single. blog. The rest of it, though – the classification – I don’t know that it’s ever been useful to me.

Otherwise, great bloggers, great blogs, great content. If I had my way, every website would exist with a dark background and a light text, but that’s just me and my high-contrasty preferences.

I’m not overly concerned by less posting in itself. I suspect the raw number of posts by each blogger on scientific or practice of science topics has remained constant. The cross-blog banter posts, complaints about the SB overlords, etc have almost disappeared. Some of that is a welcome disappearance, but some of it was interesting or, at least, entertaining.

Since I know some of these folks on a little more personal level than escapes on the blog, I guess I am more aware of the stuff going on in their lives that pushes blogging to the back burner. And it is perhaps the case that part of what drove certain folks to leave Sb is that they’d reached a point where they were looking to cut back. Changing contexts has a way of permitting big changes in a habitual behavior, does it not?

How the fucke is it an “elephant” that people here at Scientopia don’t publish a thousand Youtubes videos and “News Flash: Religious Fuckewitte Assholes are Still Religious Fuckewitte Assholes” posts per day?

Haha have to agree with Physioprof on that one, and on not changing the banner. I like the retro 70’s style 😉

One bug that has bugged me (though I haven’t been reading much so it may have been fixed) is that the ‘recent comments’ change once you are in a thread. So if you get to a blog and there are 6 recent comments on two threads that you want to catch up on, if you click on one and read the latest and then want to click on a comment in the list from the other thread (as a quick way to navigate there from the page you’re on) it’s not there anymore in the ‘recent comments’ on the side. They seem to be older comments or comments in that thread only, which is not useful and you have to go back to the home page to get to the next thread.

If a blog gets a lot of comments it’s sometimes hard to know which threads have updated. It was nice the way IBTP used to do it, where you had a list of recent commenters on each thread that had updates, so it was always easy to stop by after a few days and immediately get a picture of which threads were active, who had been commenting.

DM it was some anti-racist crap. And I still think you could feature a couple of my comments.

I didn’t know he stopped blogging. I had a run-in with him a couple of months ago and was banned from his blog. He went on and on about how I have two personalities, that there is a good Isabel and a bad Isabel. The guy is a wacko.

It wasn’t funny at all, check the link. I barely said anything, and as you know I am hardly ‘wacko’. It’s very offensive that you keep saying that, is it because I am a working class woman who tells it like it is and stands up to you from time to time?

In fact, I found it interesting that you made the same exact point I was making, the comment he was freaking out about, on your own blog more recently, CPP.

I would like to see more physics posts that aren’t astrophysics / cosmology on scientopia. Stars and galaxies ect are cool, and they do get the layperson interested in the physical sciences, I think because it is so easy to look out your window at night or grab a pair of binoculars and view the stars and constellations and the pictures are very pretty. There is just so much more in the physical sciences that I feel is rarely if at all looked at through blogging. This is obviously not a comment specifically about your blog. For me this is something missing in the blogosphere and it would be nice if scientopia could fill this.

Specifically on the main page, because the section headings and then the lists of recent posts are grey and blue in color, the headings don’t stand out, and its easy to skim and miss the section you’re looking for. If the headings where brighter, or contrasted more in color, then this might not be a problem.